Free Thought Lives

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Heterodox thinking requires room to be made for different views, different ideas, and different voices to be heard. With sufficient heterodox thinking, it is hoped, the bonds that blind and bind people into groups of tribal moral warriors might wither and eventually allow for truth to replace ideology. However, if the first Heterodox Academy meeting is any indication, heterodox thinking poses substantially more problems than even the hardworking leaders of Heterodox Academy realized. Entering the meeting I was immediately struck by the fact it was held in the New York Times conference center—a beautiful area replete with wait staff, security, and a professional grade lighting and recording area. Everything was well orchestrated, professional, and deliberate. And as Jonathan Haidt took the stage, I felt a sense of respect for a man who has not only deepened our understanding of humanity but who has also worked diligently to make Heterodox Academy a reality. He has, in many ways and sometimes against scathing criticism, popularized the idea of intellectual diversity—making the case that people like me, who …

Introduction — John P. Wright, Ph.D. John Paul Wright is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati. He has published widely on the causes and correlates of human violence. His current work examines how ideology affects scholarship. Follow him on Twitter @cjprofman. Thirteen years in the making, the American Psychological Association (APA) released the newly drafted “Guidelines for Psychological Practice for Boys and Men.” Backed by 40 years of science, the APA claims, the guidelines boldly pronounce that “traditional masculinity” is the cause and consequence of men’s mental health concerns. Masculine stoicism, the APA tells us, prevents men from seeking treatment when in need, while beliefs rooted in “masculine ideology” perpetuate men’s worst behaviors—including sexual harassment and rape. Masculine ideology, itself a byproduct of the “patriarchy,” benefits men and simultaneously victimizes them, the guidelines explain. Thus, the APA committee advises therapists that men need to become allies to feminism. “Change men,” an author of the report stated, “and we can change the world.” But if the reaction to the APA’s guidelines is …

Concentrated Power is Not Rendered Harmless by the Good Intentions of Those Who Create It — Milton Friedman Administrators and staff at Edgewood College were recently called together to discuss a troubling note placed on the door to the diversity office after the election of Donald Trump. The note, which included a smiley face, stated “Suck it up, pussies.” In the hours after the note was found, the diversity office had coordinated with the Title IX office, human resources, the office of student conduct, and the Vice President for Student Development to determine an appropriate course of action. In their joint email to the Edgewood campus, the ad hoc committee said that the note “was hateful and harmful,” and that “it violated every value that this institution considers to be at its core.” If such a condemnation wasn’t enough, they added that “Covert micro-aggressions and overt macro-aggressions appear to have taken on a new fervor” since the election. They promptly determined that the note constituted a hate crime and called the Madison, Wisconsin Police Department. …

We live at a time where academic freedom is under threat from ideologues and activists of all persuasions. The latest threat comes from St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where administrators appear to have capitulated to a mob of activists (students and academics) who mounted a campaign to have a young scholar fired for “problematic” research. The back-story was covered by Quillette last December. The norms of academia—which have been built up and preserved by institutions such as Cambridge for centuries—demand that academics engage with each other in a scholarly manner. That is, if one academic has a problem with the methods or conclusions of another’s research, he or she should address those concerns within journals, according to established procedures, which other scholars can then read and respond to, including the academic whose research is being challenged. Today, due to the hyper-specialisation of academic fields, most academics will not be able to judge the quality of scholarship that is published in journals outside their field. That’s why when research is peer-reviewed it is done by experts in the …

The Australia Council for the Arts, state Arts ministries, Humanities faculties, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) should not force taxpayers to fund work that explores the desert of identity and rejoices at mirages. Today, one encounters examples of identity culture in multiple artistic fields. “Join us to explore the meaning of identity,” wrote the Director of the 2016 Melbourne Writers Festival on the program’s welcome page. The Director of the Melbourne Conservatorium, Gary McPherson, lists identity among his principal research topics. Pamela Burnard, a Cambridge professor and Melbourne University alumnus, considers identity of supreme importance. According to Burnard, academics and music teachers must “understand the voices and the multi-voicedness of students” and celebrate “diverse creativities” for the sake of an “emergent ecology.” (I do not know what this means.) John Gray, the well-known critic of liberal humanism, referred to Burnard’s ilk as members of “increasingly marginal universities.” The more that twenty-first-century societies lose interest in the Humanities, the more Humanities academics pretend to address everyone, promote social participation, and …

“…Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” — Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Like Alice, we’ve all pondered the question: “who am I?” Moreover, we often couple it with the reasonable companion query: “how did I get to be this way.” Not all of us are rich and famous, we can’t all bend guitar strings like Hendrix, and most of us will never have supermodel looks or the physical prowess of a professional athlete. There is fascinating unity in all of us, though, concerning how we answer the question of “why am I this way” as opposed to some other possible version of myself. Whether we credit them for our successes, or point at them as a hurdle that we had to clear, most of us implicate our parents when constructing a narrative about why we are the way that we are. It’s not an unreasonable intuition. But how we intuit about the world can mislead us; sometimes that “light at the end of your tunnel” is, …

You wouldn’t think that a defense of reason, science, and humanism would be particularly controversial in an era in which those ideals would seem to need all the help they can get. But in the words of a colleague, “You’ve made people’s heads explode!” Many people who have written to me about my 2018 book Enlightenment Now say they’ve been taken aback by the irate attacks from critics on both the right and the left. Far from embracing the beleaguered ideals of the Enlightenment, critics have blamed it for racism, imperialism, existential threats, and epidemics of loneliness, depression, and suicide. They have insisted that human progress can only be an illusion of cherry-picked data. They have proclaimed, with barely concealed schadenfreude, that the Enlightenment is an idea whose time has passed, soon to be killed off by authoritarian populism, social media, or artificial intelligence. This month’s publication of the paperback edition of EN in the US and UK is an occasion for me to weigh in on the controversies that have flared up in the year since …

Best of Quillette Narrated

Greg Ellis reads The Psychology of Progressive Hostility, Matthew Blackwell’s essay about why progressives are more hostile than conservatives when their beliefs are challenged. It was published in Quillette...